Kinsey

We’re in late 40’s / early 50’s America, everyone’s wearing light-coloured suits, looking clean cut, and talking in that Momma’s Apple pie type accent. A College Professor and son of a Methodist by the name of Kinsey (Neeson) is causing a stir because he’s talking frankly about sex and naturally students are flocking to hear that. Sex to his peers is something done quietly in the bedroom, its not a topic for public discussion but biologist Kinsey thinks that’s precisely where 50’s middle-class America is going wrong – people should talk frankly about it.

Kinsey is a man with a mission and with the publication of his 1948 book Sexual Behaviour in the Human Mind, this sex guru can’t get enough of finding out about different encounters. To him, sex is all about biology and different learning encounters. Divorcing himself from feelings, he comes up with a weird comparison between human beings and gall-wasps.

Kinsey is particularly good early on when it exposes the sexual misinformation being put out under the guise of sex education and highlighting the misconceptions and prudish puritanical attitudes of some who prefer sex not to be discussed.

Later on, Bill Condon’s film loses some of its dramatics merely because it has lost a confrontational aspect (Kinsey confronting his puritanical peers) that appears earlier on. It’s an enjoyable film but its more sex as a library topic than anything titillating. Neeson and Linney do what they can with the limited slightly dry material and ultimately whilst Kinsey is an amusing eccentric type, he’s still like a labcoat scientist and a man of his time and you’d have to be interested in the subject matter or perhaps to have lived through the period, to get much out of it.

Matt Arnoldi